Untitled

Modifying plurals, classifiers, and co-occurrence: The case of Korean

“…Numeral classifiers and plural morphemes have been claimed to be in complementary distribution, either between or within languages (e.g., Chierchia 1998;Borer 2005). For instance, Borer (2005) claims that nouns enter the derivation with an undivided mass interpretation, which is incompatible with counting.…”

Quantity judgment and the mass-count distinction across languages: Advances, problems, and future directions for research

“…Investigating the mass-count distinction across languages can take many forms. For example, one might explore the various ways in which languages encode measurement and counting that are similar to or different from the ways they are encoded in English using the mass-count distinction (see Krifka 1995;Chierchia 1998;Borer 2005;Doetjes 2011;Bale & Gillon forthcoming). In such an investigation, the goal is not necessarily to test whether a given language has a mass-count distinction, but instead to probe variation with respect to the syntactic expression of number, measurement, and quantification.…”

“…One might also ask whether there are alternative morpho-syntactic systems that represent the same underlying syntactic distinction between mass and count. In this vein, researchers have investigated classifier languages like Mandarin, Japanese, Western Armenian, and Ch'ol, inter alia (see Krifka 1995;Chierchia 1998;Cheng & Sybesma 1998;Borer 2005;Doetjes 2011;Li 2011;Rothstein 2011;Li & Rothstein 2012;Bale & Coon 2014;among others). As discussed briefly with Ch'ol above, classifier languages often require an extra word or morpheme to mediate the relationship between a numeral and a noun.…”

“…Let's now turn our attention to the other claim often made in the literature on classifier languages, namely that all bare nouns in such languages are semantically like mass terms in English (see Krifka 1995;Chierchia 1998;Borer 2005;Bale & Barner 2009;Rothstein 2010;Bale & Gillon forthcoming;among others). Some of the authors who make this claim hypothesize that all bare nouns in classifier languages are substancelike (see, e.g., Lucy 1992).…”

The noun/verb and predicate/argument structures

“…predicates and arguments differently not only from what has been proposed here but also from one another. According to Chierchia (1998), bare lexical nouns can be predicates, arguments, or both, depending on the language (he suggests, however, argumental to be the default type acquisition-wise). In traditional formal semantics, however, there would be no difference in meaning at all between cat and be a cat, asleep and be asleep, etc.…”